Headlines

Medicaid provides health care to low-income people. And
California is set to be the first state to offer it to immigrants
younger than 26 living there without legal permission. Starting
in January, California will expand eligibility to include
undocumented people ages 19 through 25. The change allows them to
apply for full health coverage under Medi-Cal, the state’s
version of Medicaid. It’s part of a bigger plan to eventually get
everyone in the state covered.

President Donald Trump’s executive order to transform kidney care
lays out ambitious goals for shifting 80% of patients now on
kidney dialysis out of high-cost clinic settings to more
convenient and cost-effective home care by the end of the next
decade.

Yet the details of the proposal for achieving that goal appear to
be far less threatening to the major dialysis providers than
initially feared by many investors.

“The encouragement to build out home (dialysis) and the penalty
for not building out is not as great as we thought would be
necessary to spur that to quickly change behav

About 34% of medical malpractice claims over a 10-year period
that resulted in permanent injury or death to a patient were
caused by diagnostic errors, according to a new study.

The findings, published Thursday and conducted by researchers at
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, highlight the
serious injuries that may result from diagnostic errors, among of
the most common mistakes in medicine.

Two San Francisco supervisors agreed Thursday to postpone a
sweeping ballot measure to overhaul the city’s mental health care
system, following weeks of heavy pushback from Mayor London Breed
and the Department of Public Health.

Supervisors Hillary Ronen and Matt Haney originally wanted to
place the measure on the November ballot, citing extreme urgency
in mending the city’s broken mental health care system.

The Trump administration has withdrawn a key proposal to lower
drug prices, which its top health official had touted seven
months ago as the most effective way to curb medicine costs for
consumers.

The drug rebate rule would have ended a widespread practice in
which drugmakers give rebates to insurance middlemen in
government programs such as Medicare. The idea was to channel
that money to consumers instead.

The CMS wants to lower states’ requirements for showing that
their Medicaid fee-for-service payment rates are adequate to
enlist enough providers to offer beneficiaries satisfactory
access to care.

The rule proposed Thursday would rescind a 2015
Obama administration rule requiring states to file an access
monitoring review plan and update it at least every three years.

The CMS said the proposed rule would save states money, and that
it would issue a separate guidance reminding them that they must
ensure beneficiaries have adequate access to care. The public
will have 60 days to comment.

British company Reckitt Benckiser has agreed to pay $1.4 billion
to resolve all U.S. government investigations and claims in what
is the biggest drug industry settlement to date stemming from the
nation’s deadly opioid epidemic.

In a statement Thursday, Reckitt Benckiser denied wrongdoing
but said the settlement deal “avoids the costs, uncertainty and
distraction associated with continued investigations, litigation
and the potential for an indictment.”

Once again, the fate of the Affordable Care Act is before the
courts. The health law has traveled all the way to the Supreme
Court (twice!) and is highly likely to make another visit.

On that path, the law made a stop Tuesday before a three-judge
panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. Both
sides presented
arguments, interrupted, at times, by sharp questions from two
of the judges.

For those just tuning in, the Trump administration is not
defending the nine-year-old ACA.

When reforms shortened working hours for U.S.
doctors-in-training, some worried: Was that enough time to learn
the art of medicine? Would future patients suffer?

Now a study has answers, finding no difference in hospital
deaths, readmissions or costs when comparing results from doctors
trained before and after caps limiting duties to 80 hours per
week took effect.

“Some still long for the old days of 100-hour work weeks, but
most of the world has moved on and realized there are better ways
to train residents,” said Dr. Karl Bilimoria of Northwestern
University Feinberg School of Medicine, who was not involved in
the research published Thursday in the journal BMJ.

We already know how to stop many cancers before they start,
scientists say. But there’s a lot more work to be done.

“Around half of cancers could be prevented,”
said Christopher Wild in the opening session of an
international scientific meeting on cancer’s environmental causes
held in June. Wild is the former director of the World Health
Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer.

“Cancer biology and treatment is where most of the money goes,”
he said, but prevention warrants greater
attention. “I’m not saying that we shouldn’t work to improve
treatment, but we haven’t balanced it properly.”

The Trump administration has announced an ambitious plan to
change treatment for kidney disease in the United States.

President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday directing the
Department of Health and Human Services to develop policies
addressing three goals: reducing the number of patients
developing kidney failure, reducing how many Americans get
dialysis treatment at dialysis centers and making more kidneys
available for transplant.

Bettye Jean Ford was in her second trimester when the pressure
she had been feeling in her abdomen for weeks turned to
excruciating pain. She rushed to a Los Angeles emergency room,
where she was diagnosed with a urinary tract infection and sent
home with antibiotics. Still cramping severely, the first-time
expectant mother spent the next 24 hours trying to sleep.

The next morning, her obstetrician found her dilated and sent her
to the hospital next door where an ultrasound confirmed she was
in labor.

A more than yearlong, ongoing contract battle between Kaiser and
its clinicians’ union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers,
is part of a larger crisis playing out throughout the city — and
nationwide — of lacking mental health services for children.

Chief information officers at children’s hospitals tend to have
higher salaries than peers at other healthcare institutions,
according to data from the College of Healthcare Information
Management Executives.

Senior healthcare IT executives, including CIOs, from children’s
hospitals made an average salary of $309,028 in 2018, according
to CHIME. That compares to the $287,385 average salary earned by
executives from academic medical centers, as well as the overall
average base salary of $235,806 across organization types.

Rancho Cordova-based Dignity Health Medical Foundation has
named Theresa Hylen, a longtime executive at
Sacramento-based Sutter Health, as its new chief financial
officer.

Dignity’s medical foundation includes a network of 950 medical
providers and 800 affiliated network providers in California. The
organization also operates 15 medical groups and 124 clinic
locations across the state.

AB 1404, drafted by California state Assembly member Miguel
Santiago, a Democrat, would close an alleged loophole that allows
not-for-profit systems to hide deferred compensation when
not-for-profit entities are used to provide a supplemental
retirement plan to employees that work for a for-profit arm of
the company.
The legislation would require organizations to tell
the secretary of state the total amount of deferred compensation
allocated by the not-for-profit entity every year, the name and
title of each individual, whether taxes were paid on the deferred
compensation, and the agreement or legal document governing the
deferred compensation.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order
making sweeping changes to kidney disease treatment.

In addition, the CMS launched five new payment models to revamp
kidney care. The administration’s changes include revising rules
to ensure that kidneys reach patients more quickly, moving more
patients into home dialysis, encouraging development of
artificial kidneys and increasing the number of kidneys available
for transplantation.

In a sit-down interview with CNN, 2020 Democratic presidential
primary candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden touted the
Obama administration’s passage of the Affordable Care Act,
asserting that this law evened out the playing field when it came
to insurance coverage of mental and physical health.

“We made parity between mental health and physical health,” Biden
told CNN’s Chris Cuomo. “It was a fundamental breakthrough in how
we thought about how things should work.”